If you look at the work place as it exists in the US, or many other countries for that matter, there is a fairly defined and constant relationship between the company and the employee. There are those companies that try to break the mold and have a different relationship, but for the most part it's fairly constant across companies and industries.

As company size increases the number of people in management also tends to increase and the upper management tends to become more and more removed from the people who are actually working with the customers and writing the code or doing the real work. The people making the big decisions know less about the situation than the guy on the front lines hence the large number of problems that arise that are satirized in the Dilbert comics.